Fielding Sargent. A Novel by Elsa Barker, Author of “The Son of Mary Bethel,” “Letters from a Living Dead Man,” etc.  E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1923.

This book is the case-history of a fictitious person with an extremely tenuous thread of plot running through it. The protagonist, Fielding Sargent, is a retired manufacturer of locomotives, who, at the age of 45, develops a psychoneurosis. His morbid fears and hallucinations drive him to a psychoanalyst, one Sigurd Aubrey, who is a composite of Freud, Jung, and Rachmaninoff. From then on the analysis develops along classic lines. The characters converse with each other by extemporaneous lectures in analysis, studded with quotations from Freud, Jung, Adler, Silberer, et al. Fielding Sargent is relieved, of course, of his neurosis and able to marry a widow of 35, whose not too subtle demonstrations of readiness he had hitherto repelled on account of infantile fixations.

This book is falsely labeled a novel. It is merely another exposition to the lay reader of some of the possibilities of psychoanalysis, but as such, has its value. Premising that the lay public should read works of this sort at all—unless and until recommended to do so by a particular analyst while being analyzed—it may be that the thin disguise of fiction will intrigue some; but this possibility is more than counterbalanced by the necessity, in a work of this sort, of omitting sexual subjects entirely. With the exception of one lightly touched upon incident and a few stray hints, one would suppose that Fielding Sargent was an eunuch. This appears to be an attempt to sugar-coat the pill of psychoanalysis for the prudish physician and is hardly justifiable, from the point of view of frankness.